Foundational Yoga Flow was written by Collette Ouseley-Moynan as a collection of 90 poses segmented into three parts: Awaken, Deepen, and Soften. But this resource goes a step further as Texas-based photographer Weston Carls documented the journey across west Texas, capturing the beauty and energy of each pose. In this episode, Collette and Weston shared their experiences in the making of Foundational Yoga Flow.
Foundational Yoga Flow https://ecs.page.link/Kri2Y
Collette Ouseley-Moynan
Collette Ouseley-Moynan is a teacher, seeker, and connector in Austin, Texas. She has been leading yoga and meditation classes since 2010 and can currently be found hosting pop-up community events all over the city, including at Zilker Botanical Garden and as a part of Austin Public Library's programming.
Ouseley-Moynan began her journey into yoga while at Bennington College, where she was studying Italian language and theater. Through yoga, she found a deeper connection with her body, her spirit, and the inner workings of her mind. After receiving her bachelor's degree, she went on to stud at the College of Santa Fe, where she completed her master's degree in curriculum and instructional leadership in 2008. She went on to teach elementary school, worked as an educational consultant, and eventually moved into private school administration.
During her years working with children, she yearned to bring the same qualities of playfulness, curiosity, and exploration through movement into the adult realm, and thus she became certified to teach yoga in 2010. In 2016, Ouseley-Moynan completed her 500-hour certification with Laughing Lotus Yoga in New York. Since then, she has led over two dozen yoga teacher trainings, with both Wanderlust Yoga (in Austin) and Breathe for Change (in Los Angeles; Seattle; Washington D.C.; and Austin).
She is an avid traveler and has had the pleasure of hosting classes and retreats all over the world, including in Mexico, Morocco, Brazil, and Nicaragua. She currently facilitates Rest Fest, an annual yoga retreat. She is also certified in Lagree Fitness Instruction and is certified by MUNE as a meditation guide. She leads mindfulness practices with teams from Front Gate Tickets and Ticketmaster. Inspired by her time designing curricula for schools as a private consultant, Ouseley-Moynan puts the same attention into building her classes. Each practice purposefully follows an arc and is infused with philosophy, history, anatomy, and breath work to make the experience a holistic exploration.
Weston Carls
Weston Carls is a photographer from Austin, Texas, who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 with a journalism degree and a concentration in multimedia design. He served 11 years as the creative director for a monthly fitness publication, Austin Fit Magazine, where he produced over 220 issues, completed 1,500 photo shoots, and created over 10,000 pages of content for various publications.
In 2018, Carls started TheFitBiz, Inc. which offers a variety of content-creation services. His mission is to build stronger communities through creative, impactful content. He has provided photography for multiple yoga books, including Power Yoga and Rocket Yoga. He has worked with notable personalities such as Olympian Gabby Thomas, and his work is seen inside Lululemon athletic stores in Austin and San Antonio. Carls was voted best photographer in Austin in 2022 and 2023.
Human Kinetics https://ecs.page.link/is5vj
You're listening to the Human Kinetics Podcast, the leader in physical activity and sports publishing, providing authoritative coaching resources for over 50 years, featuring educational and engaging conversations on the most relevant topics in fitness, strength and conditioning and sports performance. Hi everyone and welcome back, welcome to everyone joining us today. I have two guests as you see here joining me to discuss what sounds like and intriguing and fun project that they have put together. I'm interested in learning so much more about this. We have Colette, who has been leading yoga and meditation classes since 2010 and West and Carl's who is a photographer from Austin, Texas. Now I will let them each dig in a little deeper into kind of their background and how they actually join forces to create this project and we'll discuss that in a little bit. But it is a book detailing 90 poses along with beautiful photography, which I'm interested in learning more about to make this truly unique book, foundational yoga flow. So thanks again for both of you joining me today, I really appreciate it. Happy to be here. Yeah, thank you for having me. So again, to sort of lay the foundation, I guess, could each of you tell the listeners a little bit about your background, how you got interested in your respective careers and really how you got to the point where you are today. Sure, I'll go first. So I've been teaching yoga and mindfulness in Austin for about 15 years. Prior to that, I was a school teacher and I have my master's in curriculum development, so I'm very interested in the process of learning. And I've led yoga teacher trainings and I really love sharing the practice of yoga with others. I think there's so much to learn from within when we get quiet with ourselves, when we listen to our bodies, when we listen to our own intuition and yoga is definitely a tool to make that happen. So I was really excited to be able to work on this book with Westin to help bring yoga to so many more people. Yeah, it's been a dream to work with Kaleid on this project. This is my third yoga book to work on with human kinetics, but this is my first authored book, and I'm so pleased with how I turned out and how I got my start in photography was a case of mistaken identity. I was never a photographer. I was actually a creative director for a fitness magazine here in Austin, Texas for a long time. And somebody out of the blue just said, "Hey, we have a shoot and we want you to do this." And I'm like, I've directed shoots and things like that. So the next day, I just bought a camera and started doing it. I'm not really knowing how it all turned out. That was about nine or 10 years ago. And so today, I published a author. It's amazing. Well, I could say if your career happened by accident, you're definitely doing a great job as everyone will see when they get their copy of this book. I'm impressed with the way everything turned out. Kaleid, that's so interesting to hear about how you were a school teacher, working with curriculum and then kind of transitioned into yoga. What was that? I know that this wasn't kind of a planned question, but what was that like or why did you end up transitioning there? Yeah. I've always had a love of movement. My bachelor's is an acting and minor in dance. And I took yoga classes as part of my college curriculum and always was practicing yoga. And actually when I moved to Austin, kind of also serendipitously like Weston's story, there was a hiring freeze for elementary school teachers, which is what I was. So I couldn't get into any school's teaching. And I just was spending a lot of time at a yoga studio and teacher training opportunity opened up. So I decided to say yes. And I loved it. And I really just felt like it was a powerful practice and I wanted to be in the seat of the teacher in that lens so that I could share the practice with others. And I just started teaching and became my full time career. Well, it sounds like it's definitely worked out for both of you in your cases. So you're obviously coming from two different perspectives. How did the concept of this book come about? How did this whole thing originate? Well, there was a book that I was working on with David Kyle. It's called Rocket Yoga in Puerto Rico. And I asked some of the trainers that were featured in that book if they wanted to take photos around the islands. And yeah, I sort of just gave those to human kinetics to use for the book as well as some of the in studio shots that we did and was given the opportunity to have the art direction of this book. And Collette and I really liked West Texas as a representation of the foundational yoga flow because there's a beautiful vastness and grandeur to that area. And the book kind of coincides with how you awaken. There's some awakening poses that are in the morning in a garden. There's some power poses, stronger poses that are out on the sand hills of Monahan State Park. And then there's some more restful poses in and around Martha, Texas which is six and a half hours west of Austin. So I'm glad that you mentioned that one of the things that I wanted to actually get into a little bit is the way that the book is kind of laid out. And there are those different sections and Collette, maybe you can speak to this too about how descriptive it is in kind of teaching those poses but also something that Western mentioned is the flow aspect of it where it kind of takes you through and it looks like there's a little bit of everything for different parts of your day to just kind of take you through your days. So how much of a benefit is that too? Yeah. I think that this book can be a resource for someone who is learning yoga, wants to get into the poses but also for somebody who has an established yoga practice but maybe need some inspiration of putting together their own sequence or their own home practice. And so the book is laid out in these morning shots that are the awakening poses. It's a great way to just start your day or if you're needing a little energy boost or a little more gentle than the middle of the book, which is our heat of the day poses, which do require a little more strength, a little more balance. And so that's a great section to go to if that's what you're working on. And then we close out the book with more grounding poses and moving into restorative poses. So even if you want to do a little bit of yoga before you go to bed and you want to get ready for that restful energy, we have that section in the book too. So you can either pull from different chapters and just do one or two poses or you can create your own whole sequence from beginning to end, starting morning to night. And I know something that you mentioned is that, you know, yoga is about so much more than just doing the poses. So can you explain maybe for someone listening to this that's brand new to yoga or interested in trying, what are some of those other benefits other than, you know, just seeing some do poses there? Yeah. Yoga is a mindfulness practice. So the poses or the asana are ways to get settled into your body and kind of relieve some of the aches and pains and tension that we acquire through the day and that when we move through that energy and we get a little bit more grounded in our body, then we have space in which to perhaps meditate or be more present, work with our breath, which is called pranayama. So the yoga practice, what we tend to see, it is represented as the physical, but the physical is really a doorway in to a connection with them now with the present moment. Okay, like I mentioned at the beginning, part of this book that fascinates me so much is the photography and how it looks like, hoping that you can share a little bit. It looks like you guys were able to travel around, excuse me, travel around a little bit, two different locations. So like you mentioned West Texas, but where were some of the, I guess more unique places where this was shot? So I've traveled to West Texas a couple of times prior to this over the last 10 years. And so I had a kind of an idea of some locations in mind. And during 2020, we actually, I photographed Colette and her husband's elopement out in Marfa, Texas prior to making this book as well. So she also got a taste of this town. And with Marfa, we loaded up how many people, five or six people up into a minivan and we drove six and a half hours to Marfa, Texas and we stayed in some Airbnb's, one of which had a beautiful garden that's actually published in a book called Marfa Gardens. And we photographed some of the book there. There was another state park that had rolling sand dunes. And I really wanted to have that, that look first part of the book. And that was a two and a half hour drive from Marfa. And we didn't really know if the weather was going to turn out or not. There was some storm clouds coming through and luckily we had a beautiful touch of little puffy clouds here and there and didn't get rained on. And then we did one in a ghost town of I think maybe three, 13 people unofficially lived there. In Texas, it was an old still reminding town. I think that's about 45 minutes away from Marfa. And so we did some poses around that the ruins and that little town. And then we just stopped on the side of the highway because it's just miles and miles and miles of highway. And we got out of the van and all of a sudden we're like, oh my gosh, because there's so many stickers on the ground. So some of the credit is due to Colette and the models and everybody involved in making the book because they had to, you know, go deal with the thorns and their feet when sometimes we're on the side of the road taking photos. So it was a lot of fun. That's a testament to the yoga practice, right, is being able to be present no matter what the conditions are around you to stay focused, stay breathing, stay steady. And I was going to ask for you, what was that experience like for you and some of the other models that were going through all this kind of, like I said, beautiful locations, but we all know anytime you're outside doing something like this, it can be kind of unpredictable. Yeah, it was a challenge, you know, we had spent a lot of time in a car. So also our bodies were a little tired, you know, from sitting. So we had to do a little warm up flow just to get ourselves ready to take the photos. And yeah, it's a whole different experience to find your balance when you're on rolling sand versus concrete versus out on the, you know, the desert plains. So it was just, again, a real practice of being present and having, having fun while we did it too. Being willing. It sounds like it's all right. It sounds like probably sort of a bonding experience, too, if you're all piling into into a van traveling together, I'm sure you have some interesting stories and memories from that too. I don't know if Collette wants to share or not, but yeah, I mean, we just had a great time together. We we minded our, reminded ourselves in order to be fresh for the morning and the evening shots, but we certainly, Martha has grown up in a tiny little desert town that's it's a high plateau desert. So I think it's about 4,000 feet up or so. And so you can get dizzy, you can get altitude sickness, car sickness, when you're winding down the roads through the mountains. So we dealt with that all really and I got car sick. Oh, no. Is that, do you get car sick? I usually, nope, it's just a flu experience, but we had to rally and keep going. Right. Well, at least, at least you had the yoga practice to help remedy that a little bit. Yeah. It was so funny. There was like a little juice stand. They have a vending machine that's, it's you don't even, it was so futuristic in this little town. And yeah, you did the juice dispenser comes out, you get this fresh juice. So that really helped us out a lot. Nice. So how long did this whole process take? I mean, you're, you're traveling around quite a bit. I'm sure not every shoot went exactly as planned. Hey, we, I think we like did a really good job. I, I think it was about four days and two of those days were pretty much driving because after being in a car for six and a half hours, you don't really want to do anything. And what do you think, Khaled? I mean, you know, I think we were really fortunate that, you know, Weston put together a plan, had his ideas of where he wanted to do the shots and we made the best use of our day. We started early, went into the night and we were pretty quick on, on the photography side. I'll have to say this, planning the date and then that date around six, five, six other people involved and doing all of this stuff, the pre planning, the pre production, it took a long time, months, a year, weeks, hours to, and then you're driving that six and a half hours, you drive in that six hundred miles, not knowing if that weekend, when you booked all day Airbnb and you booked the car, you booked everybody that is involved because they also have jobs and they're have everyday lives. And to go out there and do it with us is just amazing that we didn't have any weather problems whatsoever. That's great to hear because, I mean, like, I mean, weather can be definitely be unpredictable. Collette, as a teacher and someone who practices, excuse me, practices yoga regularly, what was that like for you to be able to just be outside in nature and kind of practicing when, I know yoga studios are great, like central locations, but what is the, how did you experience the difference in being able to be outside for the whole time? Well, I actually have been teaching a lot outside since the pandemic, quite a bit of my classes have moved to outdoor venues. And so I feel really fortunate to be able to teach outside. It really is a different kind of experience. What I think is really cool is that so much of the yoga practice is named for things in nature. So being out in nature, embodying those, you know, elements through your practice, through your body, it's a really interesting way to connect with the natural environment. So I really enjoyed being outside and I think it gives a sense of liveliness to the poses. When you see the pictures in this book, they really have a dynamic energy to them because of where they were shot. Western as a photographer, were you able to kind of feel that too, and kind of just taking in your surroundings and being able to photograph these? It was so, I was so excited to do this because it was outside of Austin. I have photographs here in Austin a million times over all the backgrounds, all the spots. So going out to somewhere new, but also a little familiar, but never really in a purpose photograph yoga poses, was exhilarating. I think it took me like two days to recover after that trip of naps and everything. It was, I loved the fact that we were able to provide a way to enjoy looking at this book and perhaps encouraging people to drive six and a half hours out in the middle of nowhere and reset and recharge. I think this is a good foundation. I mean, it's a perfect name, right? Whenever I go out to West Texas and anytime, whether it's photography or just to go back into time really and to reset. Something you just mentioned was being able to connect with nature, connect with your surroundings. I know before you mentioned the whole practice of mindfulness, so I guess how much more beneficial is that to actually be able to be in those natural surroundings when you're practicing. I think there is a benefit to it. Studies have shown that being out of nature really helps with lowering our cortisol levels as does the practice of yoga. So putting those two together, you've got just that much more of an opportunity to get literally grounded on the earth, to really feel your feet connected to the ground, to be taking in that fresh air as you breathe, yoga is such a big practice of breathing as well. So I think that there is something really special about being able to do your practice outside and especially in a place like West Texas where it is so vast. You can look for miles and not see anything man made. And I did notice that a lot of the pictures that looks like you are just clearly out in the open and I don't know, for to me knowing my day today, that just sounds so relaxing to be in a situation like that. So could you give us some examples of some of those flows that you mentioned in the book for I guess four different times of the day or different situations that you might experience during the day? Sure, so some of the warming poses are things that you may be familiar with already like cat and cow, anything that kind of gets you moving your spine in a very mindful way is a great way to warm up. We move into some more active poses for the heat of the day which include like our warrior poses or balancing poses, balancing on your hands or balancing on one leg or doing a deep back bend. That requires your body being more warm and a little more muscular effort and engagement. And then in the afternoon we have some seated poses again but they are deeper twists and these deeper twists are a little more accessible after you have already heated up your body. So that is why they come at the grounding section. And then we close with our evening restorative poses which often have the assistance of something like a bolster which looks like a big pillow or a block using props to help support the body so that the body can actually relax and then the muscles are not doing as much of the work. It is more about opening up and stretching the joints. When I was looking at some of those, is this something that people might be able to do during the course of their work day? I mean maybe getting up from their desk and using kind of some of the area in their office even? Absolutely, a lot of these standing poses you know standing in tree pose or standing in mountain pose, mountain poses sometimes called power pose and just standing really grounded and paying attention to your posture and connecting to your core, opening up your chest, taking deep breaths. It is a great way to feel revitalized and connected to your own strength and it is a great thing to do if you are about to give a big speech or you are going in for an interview, something like that. Very good and back to you Wes and I know you mentioned you did the photography for Rocket Yoga which is another one of our human kinetics books and then after doing this one as well is this something you want to do more of? Maybe just kind of travel around and photograph yoga? Hi that would be a dream I would love to continue this ride that I am on. I loved the way that human kinetics was able to give me creative freedom on the book that I saw out of this was the West Texas flair. I would love to go to other places, I mean my bags are packed, we are going to go to Cancun, we are going to go to Costa Rica, I really loved putting this book together, being a journalism student and a graduate from the University of Texas. I just love the stories behind the pictures and what it can inspire others to do. Yeah, we are brainstorming other ideas for books and locations and hopefully we get to do it again soon. Portugal, let's go. You are already planning future trips and not a bad way to spend your time, I can think of much worse ways to spend your time. For sure. One of the things that I was thinking about when I was looking through this book is that it is a great resource if you listen to this and haven't got your copy yet, I mean I don't know if I can show on screen here just some of the kind of. I was in the garden there, just a lot of the photography, one of the ways that I was kind of looking at this is it is a very educational, very informative resource to kind of teach you those poses and give you ideas for those flows, but it's also kind of a conversational piece just with a photography. Is that something that you had thought about ahead of time or maybe when you were. I definitely wanted people to say like where was this shot at, especially in those pictures where you could show the vastness of it. Because I can be pretty magical with the camera, if you crop it in right you could shoot some of this in the backyard of somebody here in Austin, but not when you have the wide open spaces. So I think what was challenging for me was whether I shoot a landscape or portrait orientation, how is it going to lay out in the book. Those are a lot of factors that are involved in putting something like this together. But if I had to do it all over again, I feel like I would go to the same places and do the same things because it was just a great experience. And I hope that people will, like for example, like the Shafter Texas, it's a ghost town. It used to be thriving and with the silver and the resources that it had and now it's a ghost town, and so hopefully that's symbolic in some ways and just like any art piece can touch somebody. Yeah, what I think is also really special is that it really informs how varied West Texas is. You know, the shots at Monahan's Sandhills, I've had people ask me, well, where was that beach? It's not a beach, it's just a park with sand, it looks like it's at a beach. And that all of those locations were just a few hours from each other, but they all look very different from one another. And I think that that's a special thing to showcase about West Texas, too. Maybe West Texas will be getting more visitors or vacationers to check out some of those areas. I guess did you get any resistance from some of the areas that you were going to shoot or was it just that wide open where it didn't really matter? That was something I wanted to be respectful of because not only are there a lot of artists in that area and you can have some copyright laws and publishing certain things, but I called the state park ahead of time and they were so excited to have somebody have their park published in this book. They were so excited because not many people are going to go to in the middle of nowhere to go to Monahan's Sandhills. It's kind of like, I hate to compare it to this, but if you think white sands New Mexico, people know that way more because it is a lot more epic. This is someone like a little tiny, something similar. But Marfa is a very popular area and one of my, well, my Airbnb host has lived in Marfa for a long time and they work in that area. Joe and Joe, shout out to Joe and Joe and they had the garden that we photographed some of the book in and they really gave us a lowdown if we had questions. If we would get in trouble in photographing in this ghost town, it was kind of scary. You go to this ghost town, there's like nobody that actually lived there, but they kind of lived there. There might be like 13 people there. So you have a bunch of people jumping out of a van, yeah, abandoned housing, yeah, so, but everything was a breeze. Very cool. Well, I definitely thank you for your time and I guess we could talk about this, but it really doesn't do justice until you actually pick up your book to really kind of dive into it and I will do my best to try to show a little more of these, some more of these on the screen here. It's just a really, I guess, thoughtful book, well thought out, very well organized book that everyone should get their own copy. You can give it on our website humanconnects.com. I'm sure that there are plenty of other places where you can get it. I won't take up too much more of your time, but I will give you guys the last word here to kind of wrap it up and given everything that we've talked about, hopefully you can let everyone know where they can continue following all the work that you guys are doing. Yeah, I am teaching in Austin, I also do retreats as Weston suggested, I'm heading to Portugal next spring for Yoga Retreat, but everyone can find me on colletomeom.com and I teach, you know, I've got some YouTube videos up there as well, so we'd love to stay in touch with anyone and if anyone's gotten the book, we'd love to hear your reviews. I love that. I want to hear your reviews and thank you to MS.law for the compliments and doing your tripos while you're listening to us on the Zoom in your office. That's a great way to continue your day and I just wanted to thank Human Kinetics for hosting this live chat and for publishing the book, it's a dream come true to have this book, I've been holding it, I haven't even put this down since it came out, I've been carrying it around everywhere and people can find me at Weston-Carl's, I'll be out there producing health and fitness content, so come say hi, if you're in Austin, we'll go have some barbecue and maybe take a six and a half hour drive out to Marfa, check out all the lots that we photographed. Yeah, we're planning on heading back to Marfa in the spring, we've talked to some places out there where we're going to do some pop-up yoga events so definitely stay tuned. I have never been to West Texas but maybe I'll head out there sometime for vacation or something. I would love it. But yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to keeping up with both of you guys and seeing what is next for both of you. So thank you again so much for your time today, I really appreciate it and have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Human Kinetics Podcast, for more information on this and other topics, visit our YouTube channel as well as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X. For additional resources, visit our website, us.humankinetics.com . (gentle music)
